bubblic

I used Deck.gl and CARTO basemaps. https://deck.gl/docs/api-reference/carto/basemap

You don't need a token to use this map, as long as you keep the usage to a reasonable limit (I think it says 1,000,000 tiles per month)

oh yes, it is a huge issue! This article from 2013 already described that 50% of adults were suffering from loneliness. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-24522691

And it definitely got way worse during/after pandemic. I would suggest you check out some Reddit forums if you are curious to know the other half of the population. r/ForeverAlone, r/lonely, r/loneliness, r/alone, r/LonersEmpire

haha, that last category is a must in any social platform where you can show pic/vid or draw something!

The comments were by genuine people, answering the survey questions.

YC startup school videos had a concept called 'hair-on-fire' problem. There are many lonely people in the world whose 'hair-on-fire' problem is loneliness, and they are willing to try things to make it go away.

I think my app managed to tap into their needs, and I am honestly more glad that they have found it somewhat useful than that they shared me their locations for my app.

I feel you! The prime motivation to create this webapp (and the future project that is in the oven) was from my extreme loneliness during grad school. I never thought that I would be someone to experience loneliness because I thought I was a generally happy person with quite a few close friends I can talk deeply with.

I thought, why is it that in this today and age with ultimate connectivity, there is not a reasonable way to make new friends? I agree physical location plays a huge role because you feel the most connection when you are in person with someone. But with remote learning and working on the rise, this loneliness situation will only get more pervasive.

I think there is a better digital medium/channel/mode of interaction/environment that can abstract as much of the genuine human connection from real-life interaction as possible, and the current social media landscape is severely lacking at it.

I am building Lonely World to learn as much about the loneliness 'market' if you will, and validate my hypotheses for the better digital social platform. I am happy so far that people have cheered me on my mission.

It jumps to random places because a new person just logged their location! I wanted to make the whole experience dynamic and real. It worked well when there weren't so many people logging their location all at the same time haha

I will need to add features to: make toggle more user friendly; and have option to make the map jump around or not.

Thank you for feedback!

I logged myself into it, but clearly I was only logging only where I was at that point. I had the option to manipulate the database to pretend there were people there, but I chose not to. So, I had about 10 logs where I lived, and 1 log where my parents lived when I first released it haha

I posted this on Reddit forums for lonely folks (there were 4~5) and got 1000's of engagements there, out of which about 20 people logged their locations per day. It trickled to 0 after about a week. At that point I had ~150 logs.

I learned a ton from that experiment, namely: 1. People do like this stuff, 2. Website needs to have better UI/UX and be faster because they reported not being able to view the site due to server overload (was using free Streamlit hosted webapp), and 3. people's attention span is short. I am getting awesome engagement now after having posted on this forum, but I am at the same time ready for it to tank down just a week later. It is kind of like releasing a movie: it can have a huge box office weekend, but it will not sustain that because it is the same content and not too many people watch the same movie over and over again. The only way to avoid that is to offer new features that people can actually interact with, I think, so the iteration never stops.

The whole story so far has been genuine, including all the datapoints on the website, messages, and the fact that I relate to the lonely souls out there since I have personally been through one during my PhD. I think the authenticity resonated with the people and led them to interact with what I have built.

Do you see the green message after you submit your location? If you keep seeing the red message, then it means the location has not been submitted, so the survey would not be available. Please keep me posted here if you keep experiencing it so I can solve it for you and future users :)

the algorithm works this way: The geolocation acquired by the webpage is in the form of latitude and longitude. Let's say it is lat: 10.123456, long: 30.123456

I want to approximate it to 3 mile accuracy (diagonal of a box, so in one dimension, would be sqrt(3^2 /2) = 2.12 mile in lat or long). 3 mile, in geographical coordinate would be equivalent to : 3 mile / 3960 mile (Earth radius) * 180 deg / pi rad = 0.0434 degree. I divide each dimension by 0.0434, and round it to a whole number (essentially, mod 0.0434). Then, I multiply that number by 0.0434 and save that as the location.

This means that a user's location can lie anywhere inside a box with 3 mile diagonal length at that geolocation.

If you see inconsistency in my logic, please let me know.

You get me. I am torn between releasing cool features to help people feel connected and holding them back until I have established some sort of code of conduct. Move fast and break things along the way, or try to do it right, especially when the people on the platform would bias towards the vulnerable ones. The engagement I am seeing right now feels magical, and I am afraid if I don't move fast enough, people would lose interest and not come back.

Someone had a very good point that the wording seems to only imply that the loneliness is caused by lacking the listed qualities when in fact, some are lonely because of their strong attributes (good looking, smart, wealthy). I made an update so that all future messages will "attribute" to these qualities, instead of these qualities 'holding them back'. Thank you, anonymous user!

Thanks for sharing the link! This stood out to me the most: "Correspondents rarely confess to the sort of skanky, self-destructive behavior found on Group Hug (“I slept with someone I work with. He’s married. I’m friends with his wife.”). And why should they? There’s no guilty thrill of public catharsis. Tired.com isn’t another outlet for exhibitionists. It’s an unexpected invitation to quietly complain about the same old same old to a stranger who might actually listen."

Complaining to strangers who might actually listen, instead of seeking the guilty thrill of public catharsis... Something I am definitely taking note on

Thanks anigbrowl! I used a pre-built template from Tim for visual front end: https://www.creative-tim.com/templates/react-free . For hosting front and backend, I used AWS serverless architecture https://github.com/aws-samples/websocket-api-cognito-auth-sa...

I totally feel you. There is magic in connecting people from all over the world with the power of the internet, but it gets ruined by the few who spam and abuse the platform. I hope to prevent this by not offering any vanity feature right now (no pictures or cam) and by making it super open, instead of a 1:1 chat. The holy grail would be to put this behind a paywall and only those who need this service the most would pay to use it, guaranteeing some standard of behavior

The idea is that knowing there are lonely people out there can help you cope with loneliness a little. This is a minimum "viral" product for my upcoming project that allows meaningful connections between anonymous people using audio. With such fantastic response, I think I got a form of validation that there is a market demand for connecting the lonely souls.

I hope lonely people out there find solace in knowing that they are not alone in their situation.

People can also sign up on the waitlist for my upcoming app. Made this as a minimum "viral" product.